Saturday, July 30, 2011

Are you serious?

The government deficit is a serious problem, and serious problems require serious solutions from serious people.

I dug through the budget and found that $2 billion in subsidy checks are being sent to oil companies. We'll call this Government Program A (or GoPA). It works like this: the oil companies calculate and send in their taxes, then the government runs their financial data through complex calculations and cuts each company a check. If you're serious about the deficit, is this a program to cut?

With a little more research, I found another $2 billion oil subsidy program, which we'll call Government Program B (or GoPB). This program is more efficient than GoPA, because it's rather silly for the oil companies send in a tax check and then get a subsidy check back. In GoPB, the oil companies calculate the subsidy and deduct it from their taxes. If you're serious about the deficit, is this a program to cut?

Oops, it looks like I made a couple mistakes. GoPA doesn't actually exist and the real GoPB subsidy is $4 billion.

Republicans (or just plain old GOP) refuse to talk about cutting GoPB because that would be "raising taxes." Apparently, "spending" only occurs when you send a check to the government and they send one back. So your Social Security is OK to cut, because you've already sent the check in - but hands off those oil company subsidies.